The BBC Director General, Mark Thomson, is interrogated by the House of
Commons Public Accounts Committee, over why the BBC wasted 20 million
UKP on the iPlayer.
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=6W1XIwSB27A (8 minutes)
Partial transcript:
Dr. Pugh : So at what stage will we be able to fully *download* and
stream to a Mac or a Linux computer?
Thomson : You can do that now
Dr. Pugh : Both of them?
Thomson : Yeah
*LIE!*
http://iplayersupport.external.bbc.co.uk/cgi-bin/bbciplayer.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=30
See also (Roy posted earlier):
http://www.openrightsgroup.org/2008/01/10/bbc-director-general-grilled-by-mps-on-iplayer/
Pugh asks some more tough questions, like:
Q: How much did it cost to develop the iPlayer
A: More than 20 Million (no precise figures to hand)
Q: How long did it take to develop
A: No answer
Q: What was the cost to make it interoperable
A: No answer
[On the BBC's motives for finally seeking interoperability]
Q: It had nothing to do with the protests that were voiced at the time?
It had nothing to do with the fact that your group controller of
future technology actually came from Microsoft?
A: People feared that we might be planning a sort of cosy and exclusive
relationship with Microsoft. That was always planned. It was a
requirement of the BBC trust.
Note: That was *exactly* how Thomson answered, although the "it" he was
actually referring to was "interoperability", not the "cosy and
exclusive relationship with Microsoft". However, given the fact that the
BBC *do* in fact have a "cosy and exclusive relationship with
Microsoft", it makes it not only quite funny and ironic, but probably
the only truthful thing (albeit a Freudian slip) that he said during the
whole interrogation.
More:
Q: Why in a sense did you develop your own piece of kit, because there
are actually things you could have procured? I mean BTVision is one
product, BitTorrent is another, which are both developed and fully
interoperable.
A: Ah, ah, um, um, ah, ah, er, er, the system, er, um, the client, er.
(Queue Steve Jobs style speech, but with lots of stuttering).
Q: But can you not understand the view, that you spent 20 million,
clearly much more than that, on developing this piece of apparatus;
the application; which when it downloads the marvellous content of
the BBC, can't even tell me how much I've downloaded in terms of
megabytes, and so on, can it? BitTorrent can tell me how much I've
downloaded, but the BBC can't tell me (cites broadband caps).
A: Wi, wi, wi, wi, wi, we, er, er, wi, wi, megabitage, er. To be honest,
er, er, um, er. Simple. Um. Sense and Sensibility, ah, er, ah, to be
honest, um.
No wonder Mark "to be honest" Thomson is stuttering so much, with such a
bunch of lies as that. And in parliament ... and on camera too! His new
columnist, Bill Gates, must be paying him well.
--
K.
http://slated.org
.----
| "[Microsoft] are willing to lose money for years and years just to
| make sure that you don't make any money, either." - Bob Cringely.
| - http://blog.businessofsoftware.org/2007/07/cringely-the-un.html
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Fedora release 8 (Werewolf) on sky, running kernel 2.6.23.8-63.fc8
01:56:10 up 23 days, 23:32, 5 users, load average: 0.05, 0.02, 0.00
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